


Baobao

by Brynn_Jones



Series: Badass Melinda May [6]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, BAMF Melinda May, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, The Cavalry Melinda May
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 19:01:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13487766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brynn_Jones/pseuds/Brynn_Jones
Summary: May makes the biggest sacrifice when the team is faced with an impossible challenge.





	Baobao

**Author's Note:**

> 宝宝 (bǎobǎo) = baby  
> 安静, 宝贝 (Ānjìng, bǎobèi.) = Quiet, baby.
> 
> Thank you to my wonderful beta eureka1 :)

“It’s gonna explode,” Fitz whispered, staring fearfully at the object on the ground in front of him.

Phil’s breath caught in his throat. “What?” he croaked.

“Explode,” the engineer repeated, voice breaking. “It’s basically a bomb.”

Everyone went silent as the information slowly sank in, taking a step back. They were screwed - properly and definitively screwed.

Skye cleared her throat, piping up hesitantly, “Can we, uh, can we do something?”

Simmons pressed her lips tightly together, eyes glistening with unshed tears. “No,” she shook her head. “I don’t see how without-” she broke off. “I don’t see how,” she concluded with determination.

“There has to be a way,” Coulson demanded. “We can’t just give up and wait for it to blow us all to smithereens.”

Simmons shook her head, hair flying around wildly. “We don’t have anything to work with, sir. I can’t produce miracles from nothing!”

Ward put a hand on her arm. “Hey, calm down. You’ll think of something.”

The Englishwoman gasped, a sob ripping out of her throat. “I can’t!” she screamed. “It’s a baby!”

Coulson swallowed heavily, looking at the object lying on the ground in front of them. The baby cooed, and his heart clenched as he watched the intravenous filter on its chest pulse threateningly.

Skye wrapped her arms around herself in a gesture of self comfort. “But Mike didn’t blow up in the end,” she reminded them. “I’m sure you can-”

“We don’t have the ICER with us, Skye,” Fitz interrupted the girl. “We’re literally locked in an empty room with a time bomb on our hands.”

Coulson considered the kid quietly for a while, watching a spit bubble appear at its pink lips. “What if we rock it to sleep or something?” he asked.

Jemma let out a shuddering breath. “It will slow down the chemical reaction it its body but it will give us a half an hour at the most,” she answered. “In the end, it’s going to- it’s going to detonate.”

“Taking us with it,” added Ward, scowling at the little bundle.

“So what do we do, people?” Coulson demanded. “Don’t tell me you can’t come up with anything. There has to be a way to stop that reaction.”

Jemma shook her head again, and Phil was seriously getting tired of all the negative answers he was getting. “Not unless blood stops flowing through the filter,” the doctor informed him.

Skye immediately jumped on it. “So let’s do that!” she appealed. “Let’s take that damned thing off.”

Simmons pressed a trembling hand to her mouth, shaking her head again. Fitz explained it for her, “There’s no way the baby would survive an improvised surgery in these conditions. We’d just torture him,” he paused, considering, “or her.”

The female scientist nodded in agreement. “Besides,” she whispered, breath hitching, “the trauma of the surgery would just speed up the combustible reaction.”

Yeah, thought Coulson, they were totally screwed.

“And if the blood stopped flowing?” May suddenly asked quietly, startling all of them as it was the first time she’d spoken since they got locked up.

Simmons frowned at her. “Then the reaction should stop,” she admitted. “But there’s no way to do…” she trailed off, flapping her hand nervously.

May pressed her lips tightly together, eyes intent on the floor. Phil followed her gaze to the second object that lay on the floor.

“No,” he said quietly but forcefully, staring at his friend, silently willing her to meet his eyes. She didn’t.

Ward looked in between the two of them, confused at their silent communication. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“There’s one option we haven’t considered,” May spoke up, voice deep and rough.

“No,” Phil repeated. “We didn’t consider it, because it isn’t an option.”

Melinda turned to look at him, though her eyes focused at some point over his shoulder. “Phil,” she said quietly, “we don’t have a choice.”

Everything was quiet for a moment, only Jemma's shuddering breaths preventing the room from falling into complete silence. Even the baby was just silently watching them with big blue eyes, as if it realised the weight of their situation.

Eventually, Skye was the first to voice her thoughts. "You're not serious," she spoke in disbelief, eyes intent on the impassive Asian. "We can't kill the baby - just look at it!"

May didn't lift her eyes from where she was burning a hole in the wall behind Phil's shoulder.

Skye wasn't one to back down, though. "Look at it, May!" she insisted. "It's an innocent child. You can't fix everything by killing people; this is not something the Cavalry can fix."

Noticing the barely-there wince on Melinda's face at the hacker's words, Coulson tried to diffuse the situation. "Calm down, Skye," he soothed, "no one is harming the baby."

Ward cleared his throat. "I hate to say it, sir," he began carefully, "but I don't see any other way to get out of this alive. SHIELD is not going to notice we're missing for at least another two hours. Simmons said we had what? Twenty minutes?"

The doctor nodded. "At the most," she confirmed, watching frightfully as the baby's cheeks briefly flushed red.

Skye whirled at the two of them angrily. "This is sick! We can't just kill an innocent baby in cold blood. There has to be another way!"

Ward looked around the room pointedly. "What way? We're locked in an atomic bunker; by the time SHIELD finds us, we'll just be splatters on the sides of these walls."

"Well, technically, we'd be a mist of aerosolized par-" Fitz broke off his explanation. "It's not important," he concluded.

Skye stubbornly folded her arms across her chest. "Well, I'm not letting you do it," she insisted, glaring first at Ward, then at May.

Coulson sighed as he slowly grasped the hopelessness of their situation. They had been locked in an old Hydra bunker with a cute baby bundled in a blanket that was rigged to blow and nothing to protect themselves but a single gun their captors had let them keep. Let it not be said that Hydra didn't have a twisted sense of humour - letting them keep a gun just so they could be tortured by the choice they had to make between either killing an innocent baby or waiting to get blown up.

"Think, Skye," May demanded, giving the girl a stony look. "It's going to die no matter what; the question is if it takes us with it."

"It's not an it, it's a baby!" the hacker shot back viciously, getting hysterical. "And I'm not letting you hurt it!"

Phil felt his stomach turn. "Skye," he said quietly. "I understand how you're feeling but-"

"No, you don't," the teary eyed girl denied. "The poor thing doesn't even have a chance. It's not fair."

Just like a baby Skye hadn't had a chance, not really, realised Coulson. He felt his heart go out to the feisty orphan girl whose only aim in life was to figure out where she belonged.

The sharp cry of a distressed baby suddenly resonated in the room.

"We don't have much time," Simmons informed them, crouching over the wiggling infant. "I can feel the temperature rising."

May visibly braced herself. "I'll do it," she declared with determination.

"No!" Skye cried out, throwing herself in the female specialist's direction. Before she could actually confront Melinda, though, Ward thankfully grabbed the girl around the waist and held her back. Phil didn't want to see what would happen if Skye actually did attack the Chinese warrior - there was too much bad blood already.

Trusting Grant to deal with the hacker, Phil walked over to Melinda. “You can’t do this, May,” he told her quietly so no one else could hear their conversation.

She shook her head stubbornly. “Has to be me,” she claimed. “No one else needs this on their conscience.”

“May, no,” he whispered, feeling desperate as he grabbed his friend’s forearm. “It’ll break you.”

“I’m already broken,” she countered, equally quietly, as she finally met his eyes. “I did it once, I can do it again.”

Phil stared at her, a feeling of horror sliding coldly down his spine. “You-” he cut himself off, before stuttering, “In Bahrain?”

She nodded stiffly, shame clear in the dark irises of her eyes.

“Oh, May,” he sighed, his heart aching for his best friend. He couldn’t believe the strength of her. “I can’t let you do this.”

She gritted her teeth. “You have to,” she insisted. “Who else is going to do it, you?”

“May-”

“It needs to get done,” she hissed. “And you know I’m the one for the job.”

Simmons’ panicky voice reached their ears. “The baby’s getting worse, sir!” she reported. “His - or her - temperature is climbing rapidly; we have no more than five minutes left.”

Skye began sobbing into Ward’s chest, who looked a bit unsure what to do about it. Fitz stood apart from the rest of them, eyes closed as if he were imagining he was somewhere, anywhere, else.

“I can do this, Phil,” May told him, the familiar words washing over him like a bad dream. “I can fix the problem.”

He closed his eyes briefly, before turning to look at his team one last time. “If any of you have an idea, now is the time to come out with it,” he told them, hoping against all odds that the situation would miraculously sort itself. That SHIELD or someone else would burst in at the last second and save them from this nightmare.

He only received resigned looks and teary eyes in response. The baby on the ground started crying, the hiccoughing sobs stabbing at his heart. Nodding once in acknowledgment of their situation, Coulson turned back to his old friend. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You don’t have to do this.”

She met his gaze with a steely face. “I’m not going to let us all die in here,” she promised solemnly.

Coulson nodded. “I know,” he whispered, giving May his permission without actually having to say the words. He couldn’t bring himself to order her to kill a child out loud - especially not after finding out about what had gone on in Bahrain.

Taking a deep breath to center herself, Melinda walked over to the distraught child, carefully picking it up. “Shh,” she whispered quietly as Phil watched the rest of the team turn their backs on the scene. He understood; he didn’t know if he was going to be able to watch either. The baby’s wails quieted down to weak, hitching breaths - calming down in the arms of the caring woman. May slowly picked up the gun that had been lying not five feet away from the child the whole time, careful to keep it as far away as possible from the little body she was cradling.

Phil watched her take a few steps away, her back to the rest of the room as she pressed the small bundle to her chest, shushing the child softly. “Ānjìng, bǎobèi,” she whispered into a tiny ear. “Everything will be fine.”

Coulson closed his eyes as pain blossomed in his chest. May would be a wonderful mother, and he hated what this was going to do to her. He still remembered the dull emptiness and pain in Melinda’s eyes as she’d walked out of that compound in Bahrain - this was going to be worse.

The baby whimpered, causing Phil’s eyes to snap back open. May was bouncing the poor thing lightly, whispering something in her native Chinese. It seemed to take forever as the baby was clearly in distress from its rising temperature, but she finally managed to calm it down.

He couldn’t watch this, he realised. He just couldn’t.

The last thing he saw before closing his eyes tightly was the baby’s head coming down to rest on May’s shoulder.

Then there was a moment of quiet, which seemed to both stretch forever and end too soon, all at the same time, before a thunderous sound of a firing gun suddenly filled the room.

Skye screamed into Ward’s chest; Jemma started sobbing as she tightly clutched Fitz’s hand; and Phil pressed his eyelids together even tighter. No sound came from where May was standing.

It took him a long minute to gather the courage necessary to face the scene on the other side of the room. When he finally did, he noticed Melinda hadn’t moved an inch. The baby was still clutched in her arms, its small head on her shoulder - the only thing that was different was the splatter of blood staining May’s T-shirt.

Phil’s stomach turned.

He took a deep breath in an attempt to pull himself together, but it didn’t work, and he quickly found himself bent over and spilling the contents of his stomach onto the concrete floor.

“Oh my god,” Skye whispered, head still buried in Grant’s jacket. “Oh my god.”

Melinda still didn’t move, standing as if frozen in time. Coulson could even almost let himself believe she was, if it wasn’t for the rapidly growing stain on her shoulder.

They all stayed like that for what felt like forever. No one was meeting anyone’s eye; no one spoke; no one moved more than just to breathe or shuffle their restless feet. Finally, Coulson felt the need to do something - if only to disturb the oppressive calm that had settled over them.

He slowly walked over to Melinda, taking care to announce his presence to her by loudly scuffing his feet against the cement. The last thing he needed was to startle her and end up on the receiving end of her killer instincts.

“May,” he said quietly, trying to keep his voice neutral. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

She didn’t give any indication that she heard him, standing completely immovable. Phil had to concentrate really hard on her chest to see that she was even breathing.

As he rounded her and the familiar stoic face of his friend came into view, Coulson found himself holding back a gasp. May was staring straight ahead, her face cold and impassive, cheeks splattered with droplets of bright red blood. The only sign of distress he could see was the white-knuckled grip she had on the lifeless body in her arms.

He raised his hands slowly, reaching for the little bundle. “May,” he murmured again. “Let me help you.”

Phil went to put a soothing hand on her shoulder, but May suddenly jerked away violently, avoiding his touch. The expression on her face as she looked at him was scary - there was no anger, no sorrow, no pain, nothing - just an empty look reminding Phil of an unfeeling robot.

“Let me help you,” he offered again, stepping closer. “Please.”

She looked at him blankly, like she couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“May, are you following?” he checked, waving a hand in front of his friend’s face.

She blinked.

“Good, that’s good,” he assured her immediately, taking the small movement as a sign of cognition. “Now let me take the baby, okay?”

She blinked again, parting her lips and letting out a soft breath.

Coulson slowly reached out again, keeping his hands where she could see them, and was relieved when Melinda let him get hold of the small body. “Good,” he commented gently. “I’ve got him.”

He didn’t dare look at the child’s face as he carried the lifeless form to one side of the room and laid it carefully on the floor. He knew that if he caught even a glimpse, he’d never get rid of the nightmares.

Returning to his friend, he was startled by how small she suddenly looked. Her hands were hanging loosely by her sides, one of them still clasping the gun, and her hair seemed to follow the contours of her face limply. “Come on, you should sit down,” Phil offered, trying to guide her in the opposite direction of the baby’s body without touching her.

She blinked at him again, before opening her mouth. “I’m fine,” she said simply, voice calm and even.

Phil found himself unreasonably angry at her. “You’re not fine,” he told her insistently, grabbing her upper arm. “You’ve just-” he broke off, unable to voice what she had just been forced to do.

She shrugged him off again. “I’m fine.” And with those words, she turned on her heel and stoically walked over to the bunker door, where she sat down against a wall.

Phil stared after her, selfishly wishing he could just turn back time and prevent this situation from ever happening. The little boy or girl would’ve probably still ended up getting killed by Hydra, but at least Coulson wouldn’t have to watch his best friend claim she was fine right after shooting a baby in the head.

Deciding that it was better to give Melinda some space for now, he followed her example and sat down on the opposite side of the room. There was nothing to do but wait for SHIELD to find them.

They heard the cavalry arriving a long four hours later, the thumps and clanks that announced their arrival muffled by the thick bunker door. It took the team outside another ten minutes to finally make it through the door, by disabling the automatic lock Hydra had triggered once Coulson’s team entered the base.

“Commander Hill,” Coulson greeted the tall woman that appeared in the doorway in surprise. “Didn’t think Fury would sent you on a simple recon mission.”

Maria shrugged. “He seems to have a soft spot for you,” she told him. “Though, he did think you were in  _ real  _ danger - I’m sure had he known you basically just locked yourself out…” she trailed off meaningfully.

Phil didn’t have it in him to return her banter. “Thanks for getting us out,” he said instead, giving the brunette a half-hearted smile.

She frowned. “What’s wrong?”

He shook his head. “I’ll brief you on our way out,” he promised. “Let’s just get out of here.”

 

By the time the team was back aboard their fancy plane, Hill had been thoroughly informed of what exactly transpired inside of the bunker, and the report notes she had written down during his narration were already redacted. Phil rubbed at his eyes tiredly, sitting behind his desk. He had yet to talk to May and, as he gathered courage to go to the cockpit, he was dreading what state he’d find her in.

“Go talk to her,” Maria had told him before she boarded her own plane. “Don’t let her deal with this alone.”

Now, though, he had no idea what to do. The words he had said to Melinda back in Bahrain clearly hadn’t been very helpful as she hadn’t been able to let the girl go at all. He was at a complete loss.

Knocking at the cockpit door when he finally made his way downstairs, he didn’t bother waiting for an answer before entering. May was in the pilot’s seat, aviators sitting on her nose.

“Hey,” he greeted her softly, sliding into the seat next to her.

She stayed quiet.

“I just came to see how you’re doing,” he explained. “So… how are you doing?”

She didn’t look at him as she opened her mouth to answer, “I’m-”

“Fine,” he interrupted her with an irritated sigh. “I know, you keep saying that. I’m starting to wonder if you know what that means.”

She turned her head towards him slightly. “I did what I had to do,” she stated calmly. “I’m fine.”

Coulson shook his head. “I really, really hate it when you say that. You need to think of a new catchphrase.”

May ignored him.

“Oh, come on, May,” he begged her forcefully, leaning forward. “Snap out of it.”

She looked at him blankly again. “I’m fine, Phil.”

Oh, now she was just trying to piss him off, so he’d leave her alone. He wasn’t about to give up on her, though - it was time to change tactics. “You killed a baby,” he reminded her a little harshly, the words not coming any easier to him even after he’d had to say them aloud while debriefing Hill. “An innocent little baby that never did anything to anyone.”

The Chinese woman tightened her jaw. Good, it meant he was slowly getting through to her. He was willing to be harsh if it forced his friend to deal with her feelings.

“You didn’t have a choice,” he allowed, “but the fact remains, you shot him.”

Her nostrils flared as anger bubbled inside of her.

“Just like you shot that girl in Bahrain,” he finished, landing the final blow.

May crumbled. Her whole body curled up on itself as she started breathing heavily, her hands shaking.

Phil quickly grabbed her, enveloping the slight woman in a tight hug as a few harsh sobs escaped her. “That’s it,” he whispered. “Let it out.”

Melinda trembled, gripping his jacket sleeves in her hands tightly and crying into his shirt. Coulson started patting her soothingly on the back, creating a regular rhythm as she gasped for air in between shuddering sobs. “It’s gonna be all right,” he promised. “I’ll make sure you’re all right this time, okay?”

She didn’t answer - though he hadn’t really expected her to - and instead just clutched at him harder.

A couple minutes later, as the tears ceased but she still trembled in his arms, he heard her whisper brokenly, “It was a girl.”


End file.
